Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 15:08:42 -0400 From: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Cc: Vincent Mialon <vincent@netaktiv.com>, tech@gitoyen.net, Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu@freebsd.org>, Dimitry Andric <dimitry@andric.com> Subject: Re: BTX on USB pen drive Message-ID: <200803101508.43299.jhb@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <20080307234004.GA47764@eos.sc1.parodius.com> References: <200803061742.34291.vincent@netaktiv.com> <47D1C705.5030604@andric.com> <20080307234004.GA47764@eos.sc1.parodius.com>
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On Friday 07 March 2008 06:40:04 pm Jeremy Chadwick wrote: > On Fri, Mar 07, 2008 at 11:51:49PM +0100, Dimitry Andric wrote: > > On 2008-03-07 15:13, John Baldwin wrote: > > > Try this instead: > > > > > > http://people.freebsd.org/~jhb/patches/btx_real.patch > > > > Hi John, > > > > I've encounted way too many machines already with BIOSes that clash with > > the regular btx loader... :( > > Have we considered sgetting rid of BTX and using a different bootloader > altogether on FreeBSD? There's got to be some open-source, non-GPL > bootloaders which work better than our current. > > The reason I mention this is because the number of problem reports with > BTX continue to rise, and debugging them is very painful since due to > the way the crash is reported, no one can easily report a full register > dump. I suppose if the latter was addressed, the former could be solved > quicker. BTX is actually quite small. BTX is just a small kernel that lets us write /boot/loader (and all of libstand) in C w/o worrying about real mode segmentation, etc. In one sense this patch _does_ get rid of BTX in that it now runs the BIOS in real mode rather than virtual 86 mode. -- John Baldwin
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